Friday, January 29, 2016

A Rebel Without A Horse

Thursday story strip day.

As I have said again an again, the newspaper comics of the fifties were far from the wasteland they have been made out to be by lazy comic book and strip historians. Especially in the late fifties, many effots were made to reintroduce the greatness of the strips from previous decades. The still going Prince Valiant was a huge influence of course, justifying a whole genre of illustrated strips with dialoge not in the balloons but in blocks of text underneath the images. Frank Giacoia's Johnny Reb was a prime example of this and I hope one day to be able to present the whole strip here. I have shown a lot it's three years here, but recently I came across another set of tear sheets which I am sharing here. Some of these strips I have shown before, others not (or only in black and white). I will go back and add the new ones to the longer 'complete' runs of my earlier posts. But for now you can just enjoy them here. Althiough he has the reputation of never doing any work without uncredited assistance from his 'frirnds' (such as Gil Kane, Mike Sekowsky and Carmine Infantino), the earliest ones have all the marks of Giacoia doing them himself. But there are some by Jack Kirby as well.

4 comments:

This strip has a real strange arrangement of panels. Wonder how they re-arranged them if they wanted to present it in a tabloid format? They'd have to cut some panels at the sides. Maybe it was never intended to be presented in tab format, only as a half-page, but I doubt it. Sunday strips should be able to convert into any format (though I know there are exceptions).

If you want to see the rearrangement, look for my previous complete post. There I have several tabloid versions along sode the three tier ones. For the first two years (when it was still a dialogueless Sunday the tabloid version was completely changed. Most of the panels were longer - which is especially visible n the pages produced by Jack Kirby. Not only were portions of the tabloid strip cut from the top or bottom of the panel, there are often also portions of the length of the three tier version cut for the tabloid. In fact, if someone ever wanted to do a complete repring, they would have to stitch togethr the original drawings fron bot sources... and then it probably wouldn't fit on a page.

Ebay Sales

I am slowly selling my comics, cartoon and newspaper collection on Ebay. In short, when I am done scanning them and they are on the blog, I no longer need to keep the original paper. If you want to go and have a look what I have on sale now, please go to http://www.ebay.com/sch/gerapeldoorn/m.html?item=152381924308&ssPageName=STRK%3AMESELX%3AIT&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2562. Prices are low and I combine for shipping.

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I have been doing this blog for more than seven years now. I find more and more that it is used by comic book, newspaper strip and cartoon historians as a tool for their research or additional illustrations. And I encourage that. I have larger uncleaned scans for all self scanned images on this blog for those want to use it for their book or article. Just ask and we'll get something going. Family members of artists mentioned here or anyone who is interested in donating scans is encouraged to make contact. By the way, the quickest way to reach me these days is through Facebook.

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I am a Dutch television writer, who has written about comics and television for a number of publications here in Holland and in the US. I love hearing from (forgotten) artists and/or their relatives, so if you are one of those and happen upon this blog, please leave a note.